Employee Engagement for All: MMP #11

Monday Morning Percolator (MMP) #11

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.  ~ Albert Einstein.

In the center of the apple is the core, in the centre of an idea made to stick is a simple or core statement.

In the last Monday Morning Percolator, I outlined the 6 principles of stickiness outline in the book, Made to Stick. To be effective an employee engagement idea or approach must have stickiness. Otherwise it is forgotten or lost in the myriad of tasks and relationships that fill an organization and individual’s day.

Simplicity = Core + Compact. Our challenge when we leverage simple stickiness for employee engagement is to find the core and express it in the form of a compact idea that can be enduringly powerful. Simple is not “dumbing down” it is finding and communicating the core.

For example the military encourages officers in combat to ask themselves these two questions:

1. If we do nothing else during tomorrow’s mission we must _______.
2. The single, most important thing that we must do tomorrow is _____.

To translate these questions to the field of employee engagement answer these two question at the end of each day to get yourself primed for tomorrow:

1. If we do nothing else at work tomorrow about employee engagement we must ______.
2. The single, most important thing we must do at work tomorrow for engagement is _______.

To me, the simple core employee engagement idea is: Employee Engagement for All.

We all must benefit from employee engagement – employees, organizations, leaders, customers, families, and other stakeholders. Employee engagement must have mutual purpose – moving engagement from “me to we” as we all see the benefit of engaged employees and we all contribute to employee engagement.

Get Perking:

1. Write your own simple statement to lead you and your team into employee engagement.
2. Apply the employee engagement KISS: Keep it Sincerely Simple!
3. Read Chapter 1 of Make it Stick to determine why “cast member” for Disney staff is sticky and “sandwich artist” for Subway staff leaves you wondering where’s the beef? Is there a job title or role that will fully engage you in your work?

Next Week: Monday Morning Percolator #12: Unexpectedness.

Picture Credit: My personal Thanksgiving by http://flickr.com/photos/riot/289783985/

Zengagement: No Complaints

Complaining, wanting all the conditions to be just the way we’d like them, doesn’t get us anywhere. In fact, we’re just distracting ourselves from the task at hand.

Dr. Joseph Parent, Zen Golf.

ZENgagement: Inspire Yourself

Inspire yourself. A major inspiration for employee engagement comes from within.  Are you relaxed enough to perform at your best?

Dr. Saul Miller wrote a wonderful little book in 1990. I encourage you to read it if you want to feel freer, lighter, more alive and at ease.

Each of us has a personal connection to an unlimited supply of energy.

With each breath relax and breath in some of that energy.

Focus on drawing in power.

The outbreath will look after itself.

From: Dr. Saul Miller - A Little Relaxation: on being more alive & at ease.

Tie into employee engagement: Monday Morning Percolator #10

Are you holding employee engagement together with duct tape?

Don’t let engagment die with all the other projects, initiatives, and work screaming for  your attention.  Made to Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath, offers 6 powerful principles to give engagement gumption, tenacity, and longevity.

Make your approach simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional and use stories. The next 6 Monday Morning Percolators will profile each of these principles applied to employee engagement.

The Heaths offer the acronym SUCCESs to remember the principles. Here is a quick outline of the SUCCESsfull principles you will learn to make employee engagement stick:

1. Simplicity. Strip employee engagement to the core and make sure you focus on the most robust method.
2. Unexpectedness. Capture your employee’s attention…and hold it by making an element of employee engagement unexpected.
3. Concreteness. Make engagement concrete so employees understand it and remember it.
4. Credibility. Make sure employee engagement is credible for all involved.
5. Emotional. Remember that emotions will influence motions so employee engagment must become a positive emotional approach.
6. Stories. Leverage stories to inspire employees to work with full engagement.

The authors practice what they preach with a stickey cover - a picture of duct tape stretched across the book jacket. The duct tape is raised from the cover to feel like real duct tape. You will be tempted to try and pull it off but what you really want to pull off is applying the principles to employee engagement.

Get Engaged:

1. Read an excerpt from the book.
2. Browse the Made to Stick blog.

Next Monday: Employee Engagement Made Simple.

Photo Credit: Duct Tape Neck Tie by http://flickr.com/photos/jasoneppink/

Grieving an employee engagement sunset…

Can employee engagement lead to employee disengagement?

I felt sad reading how the Saskatchewan labour relations board put a halt to employee engagement activities for SGI, an insurance company in Saskatchewan. The sadness was that the very concept that could enrich the workplace for all had become a source of dispute between the organization’s management and union.

Here are a few snippets from the Regina Leader-Post article on the halting of SGI’s president’s employee engagement team (PEET):

The Saskatchewan Labour Relations Board (LRB) had ordered a temporary halt to all activities conducted by SGI’s president’s employee engagement team (PEET), including handing out bonuses under its employee recognition program.

The Saskatchewan Insurance Office and Professional Employees’ Union (COPE) Local 397 filed a complaint with the LRB in January alleging SGI had committed unfair labour practices by negotiating directly with employees through the establishment of an employee engagement committee in April 2006, which was composed of in-scope and out-of-scope employees.

The union claimed the committee gathered employee-related information, made recommendations and took steps to implement changes which related to the terms and conditions of employment of in-scope employees.

The union also complained that the employer had undermined the collective bargaining process by promoting the initiatives of the committee, by unilaterally paying bonuses to employees without the involvement or knowledge of the union and by failing or refusing to bargain these matters with the union.

SGI denied that it had committed an unfair labour practice through negotiating directly with in-scope employees by way of the president’s employee engagement team, the primary objective of which was to increase employee job satisfaction and engagement in the workplace.

I am not close enough to this situation to understand the full extent of the issues involved. In addition, it is not my intention to judge either party in the dispute, I imagine there is validity to both sides on this issue. Rather, I want to express my dismay and grief that employee engagement - something I see so positively -became an issue that probably contributed to employee disengagement.

Engagement must be for all!

This article points out the need to ensure that there is mutual purpose for everyone involved with employee engagement initiatives. For PEET’s sake and the employee’s experience of work, I hope this does not set the sun on engagement for management, union, and the employees in this company. I wish them well as they sort this out and I hope the sun will rise again on employee engagement – making the workplace a better place for all.

Get Engaged:

1. How do your employee engagement initiatives fit within the wider context of the organization?
2. How would you avoid having something similar occur at your workplace?

Photo Credit: Crescent Moon Sunset by http://flickr.com/photos/fortphoto/

The sense and cents of employee engagement

According to Shepell-fgi research group: Money not only isn’t everything – it isn’t the main thing when it comes to motivating employees.

How people are treated and how they view their managers have almost twice the impact on motivation and results compared to pay and benefits. Money does not appear to enhance productivity.

Rob Phillips, CEO of Shepell-fgi stated:

We all like some parts of our job more than others. But when overall engagement is low and when your staff prefer to not come in to work or aren’t performing at their full capacity, it costs the organization money – up to an average cost of $1.80 million for a company of 1,000 employees.

Employees want to have trust in senior management, be asked for their input, and have a clear say in decisions that affect their work.

Money is the employee engagement paradox: money is not a key driver of employee engagement for the employee yet it costs an organization great deals of money to have disengaged employees.

Get Engaged:

1. Ensure you spend time not just money with employees. Work is as much about making sense as it is about making cents.

Photo Credit: The snail and the coin (Economy goes slow) by http://flickr.com/photos/mclau/

ZENgagement: Monday Morning Percolator #9

 

Zen is a practice, psychology, religion, and way of life. I have read Zen books and articles for over 30 years ranging from the poetic and peaceful insights of Thich Nhat Hahn to the raw zen of Chuck Norris.

To practice Zen is to be engaged.

Here is a short excerpt from Thich Nhat Hahn’s, Peace is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life. I have reread this book a number of times over the years and it remains a classic on how to live mindfully. When we are more mindful we are more engaged. I loved his statement that there is no way to peace, peace is the way.

Perhaps there is no way to engagement, engagement is the way.

From Peace is Every Step:

Twenty-Four Brand-New Hours

Every morning, when we wake up, we have twenty-four brand-new hours to live. What a precious gift! We have the capacity to live in a way that these twenty-four hours will bring peace, joy, and happiness to ourselves and others.

Peace is present right here and now, in ourselves and in everything we do and see. The question is whether or not we are in touch with it. We don’t have to travel far away to enjoy the blue sky. We don’t have to leave our city or even our neighborhood to enjoy the eyes of a beautiful child. Even the air we breathe can be a source of joy.

We can smile, breathe, walk, and eat our meals in a way that allows us to be in touch with the abundance of happiness that is available. We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living. We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma, and we are willing to work very hard to get a job, a car, a house, and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive in the present moment, the only moment there is for us to be alive. Every breath we take, every step we make, can be filled with peace, joy, and serenity. We need only to be awake, alive in the present moment.

In future percolators I will offer you some more percolated cups of Zengagement.

Perk Ups

1. Wake up with engagement. Can you see your life and your work as a gift?
2. How engaged are you in reading this article or has your mind wandered off to the next task, link, or thought? Spend more moments not just mere moments in being exactly where you are and nowhere else.

Photo Credit: Random Zen-Like Art by http://flickr.com/photos/cameradawktor/222328905/

Technorati Tags : employee engagement, zen, Thich Nhat Hahn, David Zinger

An Employee Disengagement Quiz: Monday Morning Percolator #8

 

If you are a leader here is an important multiple choice question. Your answer may indicate the role you play in your employees’ level of disengagement.

As a manager, my interactions with employees surrounding their performance is the following:

a. who has time to talk with employees about this kind of stuff?

b. we talk about how to improve their weaknesses.

c. we talk about their strengths.

If you answered “c” the chance of your employees being actively disengaged is 1%.

In an interview about the book StrengthsFinder 2.0 for the Gallup Management Journal, Tom Rath discussed the strong link between a leader’s focus and employee engagement. Here were the 3 powerful conclusions from Gallup’s research on conversation, engagement, and strengths:

1. If your manager primarily ignores you your chances of being actively disengaged are 40%
2. If your manager focuses on your weaknesses your chances of being actively disengaged are 22%
3. If you manager focuses on your strengths your chances of being actively disengaged are only 1%

Perk Up:

1. You have only one task this week. Ensure that you talk with as many people, as much as possible, about thier strengths and performance. Use strengths to muscle out disengagement!

Picture Credit: Fore! By http://flickr.com/photos/ecstaticist/

Technorati Tags : employee engagement, employee disengagement, percolator, David Zinger

We Did It Our Way: Monday Morning Percolator #7

Holding Hands by http://flickr.com/photos/harpers/

The title of the third post I wrote in this employee engagement blog was: If it is to be it is up to me.

I appreciated the meaning compacted into a 10 2-letter word sentence. I was inspired by the sense of responsibility and accountability embedded in this pithy statement.

To percolate is to give something time and to let it simmer in our brain. After 6 months of percolating, I now want to revise this statement to reflect the principles of partnership and co-creation. When I wrote this statement I was 51 with an emphasis on 1. Now, I am 52 and I want to highlight the 2.

So the revisions of this statement based on changing just one letter is: If it is to be it is up to we. Yet, flipping “M” to “W” is very significant. Employee engagement is fueled through partnership, close connections with leaders and reports, friendships at work, and our caring connections with others.

I resonate with the picture of the twins holding hands and it reminds me when my twins, now 15 years of age, were that age. There is so much energy derived when we connect with others and they connect with us. We may not be wee any more, we may not hold hands at work, but we can always think as WE.

Engagement moves beyond individual effort and tasks to residing in relationships. Watch out Frank Sinatra, I am tempted to rewrite I did it my way to We did it our way.

On my strength based leadership blog I am also in the process of flipping me to we as I write a series on the  WE(E)-Factor for leaders. This is taking place as that blog is dedicated to the Mount Everest we-theme of The Brotherhood of the Rope.

Perk Ups

Identify the people who contribute to your engagement and ensure that you let them know the contribution they are making to your development

Thank you Dushyanta Persaud for being such a positive and caring person who has helped boost not only my engagement but the employee engagement of countless people you have worked with or led, and in your leadership I always sense you are working with the people you lead.

Seek out someone at your workplace who is disengaged and devote your energy to connect with them and contribute to their engagement.

Technorati Tags : employee engagement, WE(E)-Factor, percolator, David Zinger